[LT] Iron and Steel Armor

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by tbrock1031

Worse, start a supers campaign, get four different supernatural creatures as the party (they know this is a supers game, right?), three of which are vulnerable to "cold iron" ... and none of them can agree on what they actually mean by the term "cold" iron!

"Obviously the word 'cold iron' is not well defined, and therefore you cannot take a disadvantage based on it. You can take a disadvantage based on the exact substances you have in mind; please tell me what those are."

I'm of the opinion that "cold iron" is just a poetic epithet for iron, like "the red blood poured on the ground" or "he drank the sweet wine" or "they faced bitter death." (Or "rosy-fingered Dawn," for the classical trope.) You can see it used that way in Kipling's ballad "Cold Iron": the prototype of cold iron was the nails driven through Christ's hands and feet, and the Roman army didn't use rare meteoric iron for that sort of job. All iron is cold iron. Then modern people who didn't grasp the nature of poetic language in an oral literary tradition started reading the older literature and making up bizarre theories about what the epithets meant.

But whether I'm right or wrong, the mere fact that there are opinions as divergent as mine and the "meteoric iron" theory shows that "cold iron" doesn't mean anything unequivocal and doesn't define a proper limitation. Time to make them be specific.

Bill Stoddard

[Bruno]

Heck, I'm inclined to be literal minded at people, and would cheerfully turn that into "iron below 10 degrees Celsius" (or possibly 0 Celsius, the freezing point of water for folks on other systems)

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Heck, I'm inclined to be literal minded at people, and would cheerfully turn that into "iron below 10 degrees Celsius" (or possibly 0 Celsius, the freezing point of water for folks on other systems)

If you're going that way, why not simply "cold iron = iron that has frozen solid"?

Bill Stoddard

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by whswhs

If you're going that way, why not simply "cold iron = iron that has frozen solid"?

Bill Stoddard

Because the path from literalism to calling something so hot it glows 'cold' is a rather confusing one?

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Heck, I'm inclined to be literal minded at people, and would cheerfully turn that into "iron below 10 degrees Celsius" (or possibly 0 Celsius, the freezing point of water for folks on other systems)

So lots of desert fairies but few on mountain tops?

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by whswhs

If you're going that way, why not simply "cold iron = iron that has frozen solid"?

Because there's another transition at the Curie point (770C = 1418 F) that's much more plausible than that. After all that's where iron gains its magical property of magnetic attraction.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Which is what adds to confusion on this issue in a historical context - there's what the people who made it would call it, what the educated people writing about it at the time would call it, what various historians and chroniclers between then and now would call it, what the industrial people today would call it, and what the people hand-crafting it today would call it.

I've come to think the closest it comes to a clear distinction is it's iron if the guys making it reduced it from ore, and steel if they remelted it and/or added something to it on purpose. Even that has exceptions, but its much closer than most other versions based on chemistry nobody naming the various classes of products had any idea about.

[martinl]

Originally Posted by tbrock1031

Worse, start a supers campaign, get four different supernatural creatures as the party (they know this is a supers game, right?), three of which are vulnerable to "cold iron" ... and none of them can agree on what they actually mean by the term "cold" iron!

One person means wrought iron, one person means cast iron, and a third means any iron! The one who didn't make their supernatural critter vulnerable to it thinks that "cold iron" should be either meteoric iron or alchemically-treated iron.

Cue a six-way discussion between the GM, players, and the channel's resident mad engineer over what exactly is "cold iron".

If this is a supers game, why can't they all be right? That is to say, they all have different weaknesses but call them the same thing. Then let the characters have the argument, instead of the players...

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by martinl

If this is a supers game, why can't they all be right? That is to say, they all have different weaknesses but call them the same thing. Then let the characters have the argument, instead of the players...

That's fine, but that's at the object level. The meta-level needs clarity. That is, the GM has to know exactly what the various weaknesses are!

Bill Stoddard

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by whswhs

That's fine, but that's at the object level. The meta-level needs clarity. That is, the GM has to know exactly what the various weaknesses are!

Nah, he just needs a frequency of occurrence, I don't need to know what something is to have it come up in a game. Particularly interesting if they took it with different frequency. "Sorry, Bob, apparently this guy's bullets count as cold iron for you. Jim, you're in luck, they don't fit your definition".